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Brain Teaser - Dead Link Ranking in SERP's

Came across a site that is coming up for "caliber signs and imaging" which is a brand I'm working with, and a few things have me baffled:

1. The link in the SERP takes you to an error page (you can manually access it by dropping the www.)2. The entire site is setup with iFrams (header frame, body frame, and footer frame) navigating throughout the site keeps the single url and only swaps the body content.3. The site if for a sign company but the blog area served in the iFrame is in Indonesian and seems to about some soccer matches.4. The business associated with this site is in AZ, but they are coming in local (Irvine, CA) results with a dead page and no locally relevant content.

I'm I missing something or is Google missing something?

The site is "http://calibersigns.com/" and it belongs to a company in AZ. -- it comes up for "caliber signs and imaging" (in my case on the 3rd spot) or even worse "caliber signs and graphics" where it seems to be at the top, with all the surrounding content being the true brand -- which makes it look like my clients Google+ reviews and other endorsements belong to them.

I have my local setting set to "92618", Irvine CA

Would love some feedback on this and your opinion on how we should proceed?

3 Responses

Vanadium Interactive, I'm not sure what you're asking here. Obviously the first order of priority would be to fix the site. Most likely there's an issue with the .htaccess file that is causing the issue, since the non-www version of the site is accessible and the www version is not. Should be an easy fix by any competent programmer familiar with .htaccess files.

The next priority would be to totally get rid of iframes on the site, there's just no need for them anymore, and they're not very search friendly. Each individual page can get indexed separately, and you might have someone visit the "top frame" page of the site, and they couldn't navigate the site very well.

Sites like this generally rank well because of the links pointing to them, not because of the actual content on the page. I can see that the page was cached and it was working recently, but just recently ended up with the current problem.

Thank you for responding, my questions is more of a "why" is this URL ranking so well in the search results for "caliber signs and graphics", when the resulting SERP's are going to none existent pages. The SERPS that are coming up in top positions are point to the following pages:

http://www.calibersigns.com/

http://calibersigns.com/top_frame.html

http://www.calibersigns.com/contact.html

As you can see from these links there is no reason these pages should be in the index or rank for any search results. The domain authority is a whooping 13, with very few low value links pointing back the site.

I'm attaching some screen shots of the search results and the pages that are coming up.

They are no longer ranking for me on "caliber signs and imaging" set to Irvine, CA.

I think they are ranking still for "caliber signs and graphics" because it's an exact title match, and the domain is carrying a large part of the ranking

Their site is really messed up - like phenomenally messed up - looks like they still exist as of last year on facebook but they either don't use their site or it's just not updated. I don't think there was anything malicious, it's just bad.

The blog - strange! The "author's" profile IS in fact "martin" - I wonder if it somehow got hijacked. I think it DID get hijacked actually. All the posts 2011 and prior are real (like this one) - then the spam starts.

Now, if the word "caliber" is not commercial (like a "caliber sign" is not a thing, right?) - then they are still going to rank very easily for things like "caliber" despite their bad site and geographic location. So essentially, they are ranking because they are super low-competition terms, they actually haven't done anything malicious on their end - and now we know Google can process iFrame sites :)

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